`FATHER HOOD' COULD USE SOME FAMILY COUNSELING

Steve Johnson, Tribune Staff WriterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The title may sound familiar, but "Father Hood" is not about a man in tights, a man of the cloth or an urban area where the dads stick around.

What this new and rickety Patrick Swayze vehicle is about, however, is less clear, though it does suggest, ultimately, that if more wards of the state would run off to join their fathers on cross-country crime sprees, we could lick these corrupt foster-care and inattentive-dad problems.

"Father Hood" begins ominously, with an apology for the lead character, the cheeseball criminal Jack Charles, played by Swayze in a manner that suggests a man unaware he's impersonating Elvis.

"The thing about Jack . . . he kind of grows on you," contends his teenage daughter, in voice-over, just before the flashback that (A) is the entire rest of the movie and (B) challenges her veracity.

In short order, Jack wrests his two children from a Dickensian foster-care facility in Los Angeles and takes them on the road to New Orleans, where a promising opportunity for a stickup awaits.

They are pursued by the usual cinematic law-enforcement agencies (motto: "We always come really, really close to getting our man") while Jack keeps in touch via tedious telephone calls with an investigative reporter (Halle Berry, as yet another movie journalist who never takes notes). All the while, of course, he's Learning to Be a Dad.

It is difficult to parcel blame in a movie that seems smeared with the fingerprints of last-minute studio intervention, but somewhere in here, screenwriter Scott Spencer (who wrote the haunting novel "Endless Love") has hints of an interesting character study, especially when the estranged family members are on the road together.

Actors Sabrina Lloyd and Brian Bonsall (the little brother on TV's "Family Ties") shine as the multiply neglected kids trying to fight through their pain, and there are half a dozen inspired jokes.

Director Darrell James Roodt, a South African, shows the same sure touch with music he demonstrated in last year's "Sarafina!" But even more so than in that movie, he is unable to balance perhaps unbalanceable elements.

Meanwhile, the anorexic subplot about a crooked foster-care administrator and two surreal courtroom scenes ask the audience not only to suspend disbelief but to send it bungee jumping.